I
love games in general, but also in math class. We play many games as a
family and love to bring in others to play. I had the good fortune to go
to grad school with Richard Garfield
who turbo-boosted my games education. I loved his philosophy of
meta-gaming: play each game so as to increase your chances of winning
all games. A great long term view. I think some of the reasons that
mathematicians love math is that it is a lot like playing a game.
Defined objects, rules declaring what moves are permitted, desired
outcomes... a serious game that is.

This is a page to
organize the math games I've created or modified significantly with some
notes about content and a collection of the best math games I've seen
and played from other teachers in the #MTBoS. I'd like to thank my
preservice teachers as they have made wonderful suggestions and done lots of playtesting. This page will ever be in development - a lot of games to put on here!

Games on the BlogNote: links try to open in the Google doc window, so right click or control click. Sorry! - can't find a fix for that.Here's the Google doc itself if you'd rather read it like that. The newest games that haven't made the doc yet are tagged game.

Game Design one and two:
adapting a game design framework to educational games. Second one has
my current framework for thinking about the designed games. Applied the
framework to the promising number & operations game Make and Take here. Compared it to the NCTM framework, too.

Katie Salen on game design, founder of a game modeled school, Institute of Play, design professor at DePaul.

Holiday Game Design: getting 5th graders designing a math game based on Traveling Salesman problem.

Concentration: odd post taking a gamer's view on how you learn to concentrate

One of the happiest interactions I've had with game design is adapting Robert Abbott's great game Eleusis. It's a bit complicated for classroom use, so I adapted it to Eleusis Express, and it put me in contact with Dr. Abbott. I often have students play first with the sample rules until they're ready to make up their own. (Which varies student to student.)

Commercial Games
Links go to BoardGameGeek, a great reference, review and preview site for zillions of commercial games. Also - pdfs of instructions, which is wicked helpful. (My strongest recommendations in bold.)

Other People's Games
I'm going to try to keep track of good game posts, but there won't be much from before Fall 2011. In general, if you're interested in this you should be following James Cleveland, Denise Gaskins, Gord Hamilton, Kate Nowak and Nora Oswald. All prolific math games folk.

Games Teachers Play (Review Games; Adaptable game structures)
This section is for non-content specific games, the stronger (and more fun) descendants of bingo and math baseball, usually used on review days. I have not always spoken kindly of these, but I appreciate ways to get games in the classroom, teachers using structures that they have already developed, and teachers attending to their students' engagement level.

In a Global Math session on Game Show Math, Bowen Kerins included this slide. Important stuff to consider when thinking about using a game: access to all students, minimal advantage for speed, engagement for students who are most in need of review, opportunities to hear other students' reasoning.

Alyssa has Stinky Feet, a review game with positive & negative points.

Gamification:
I am not a gamifier myself (I don't need no steenkin' badges), but try to apply several of the principles and think there's a lot of great teachers doing innovative things with them. (Maybe I do need some steenkin' badges.)

Here's the resources I have compiled so far. (As the Google doc if you prefer.) As a counter point, here's a strongly worded anti-gamification essay suggested by Audrey Waters.

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